Relationships are tough no matter how similar you are to your partner, but author Charles Murray points out that personal habits you find objectionable are often the biggest deal breakers. These habits tend to boil down to three main categories.

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Everyone's a little different and you can't expect to see eye to eye with your partner all the time. That said, some things are hard to get past, and disagreeing about habits is one of them:

Personal habits that you find objectionable are probably deal-breakers. Jacques Barzun identified the top three as punctuality, orderliness and thriftiness. It doesn't make any difference which point of the spectrum you're on, he observed: "Some couples are very happy living always in debt, always being late, and finding leftover pizza under a sofa cushion." You just have to be at the same point on the spectrum. Intractable differences will become, over time, a fingernail dragged across the blackboard of a marriage.

Of course, there are plenty of other factors that go into a successful relationship, but it's probably no surprise that disagreeing about core habits is an important thing to consider. You can find an excerpt from the rest of Murray's essay over at The Wall Street Journal.